​Edited by: Anthony Hall

1. Procedural Due Process:

2. Pros and Cons of Exclusionary Rule:
3. Roe v. Wade:
  • Issue: Is terminating a pregnancy a right to privacy?
  • Background: A pregnant single woman (Roe) challenges constitutionality of Texas criminal abortion laws, which proscribe procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life.
  • Ruling: court declared the abortion statutes void as vague and overbroadly infringing those plaintiffs' Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights
  • http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZS.html

4. Everson v. the United States
  • Issue: Should parents who send kids to private school be reimbursed for bussing?
  • Background: A New Jersey law authorized payment by local school boards of the costs of transportation to and from schools - including private schools. 96 percent of reimbursements were Catholic schools. Arch R. Everson, a taxpayer in Ewing Township filed a lawsuit alleging that this indirect aid to religion through the mechanism of reimbursing parents and students for costs incurred as a result of attending religious schools violated both the New Jersey State Constitution and the First Amendment
  • Ruling: supported the New Jersey law, ruling that the money supported individual students, not the religious institutions they attended
  • http://law.jrank.org/pages/12564/Everson-v-Board-Education.html

5. Lemon v. Kurtzman
  • Issue: Can a private/ pirochial school school be reimbuursed for textbooks, materials, and staff salaries by the state?
  • Background: 1968 Pennsylvania Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act allowed state Superintendent of Public Instruction to reimburse nonpublic schools (most of which were Catholic) for teachers' salaries who taught secular material in these nonpublic schools, secular textbooks and secular instructional materials
  • Ruling: established "Lemon Test" which allows school districts, legislatures, and courts to more easily determine whether assistance to religious groups is protected under the establishment clause; established the three criteria that must be met in order for the state to provide aid to religious institutions
    • The purpose of the aid must be secular
    • the aid must neither advance nor inhibit religion
    • the aid must avoid "excessive entanglement" with religious groups
  • http://www4.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0403_0602_ZS.html

6. 3-pronged test for obscenity